For generations the conventional “roadside drama” reading of the General Prologue, despite or even because of its undeniable explanatory efficiency, has made it difficult for critics trying to view the Prologue as an object of analysis to view the whole of it. In its construction, Chaucer teases readers with the expectations evoked by the conventional genres of the dream-vision and the estates satire, dangling their promises but leaving them unfulfilled, and uses their features while rejecting their premises and withholding the normal modes of their action. Ultimately what is most distinct about the achievement of the General Prologue is how successfully it seems to ward off grasp of its artifice, organizing the experience of reading to make it seem an experience of something prior to reading.

After presenting book’s justification, the introduction articulates its central argument: that the four-tale sequence of Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin enacts a dynamically unfolding, conflicted meditation on how literary value may be construed in a way that justifies the time, energy, and expense devoted to the writing of fiction - a justification made in respect to other activities pertaining to other values, especially to economic value in the sense of making a living. The introduction then considers the metacritical stakes and implications of this argument along the methodological dimension of the bearing of manuscript evidence on the principles of Chaucer interpretation and the conceptual dimension of the problem literary value. The former consideration reviews the manuscript basis for the book’s claim about the four-tale sequence; the latter consideration indicates theoretical debts (to, e.g., Bruno Latour and Georg Simmel) and introduces several key terms used throughout the book (the most important: literary axiology, axiological person, and axiological logic), explaining the relation of these terms to more traditional ones of Chaucer criticism.